I heart Google Labs.

In its venture to scan digital books, Googlelabs has released this amazing new feature (see ngrams.googlelabs.com) which shows the number of times a word appeared in publications/books over the years. It really gives you the sense of the times and when such ideas were hot topics.

I did a random search for the BRICs countries. Probably unsurprising is the drop in the mention of "Russia" relative to "China" in recent years.

Other interesting searches: if you can type mandarin on your laptop, search for the words democracy (min zhu) and communism (gong can zhu yi) in the chinese simplified version and see how the two trends differed over the times. They coincide very nicely with certain big events (post-occupation China, GLF, also see pre-1989 and post 1989)

best of all, google has all this raw data for you to download.

oh google, you're the best!!!